This Heathkit thread has been very interesting to me as a manufacturer of professional audio equipment that uses a lot of vacuum tube circuitry. When I did the first designs for our products 20 years ago, I had a Heathkit-style assembly procedure in mind. In fact, at one time, I made an assembly manual that copied the Heath format with the check-off boxes, solder or don't solder, etc.
When I started out, I was building each unit myself, and as much as I enjoyed it, after a while I thought I was in "Heathkit-hell." Now I have six assemblers who do 95% of that work, and they do a better job of it than I could do. I rotate them through the nine products we make so they don't get burned out building the same thing all the time. Parts are readily available for this type of construction. DigiKey, Mouser, and Newark are all on our suppliers list for those components we do not buy in sufficient quantity to purchase directly from the manufacturer. Prices can be high, and for us a major challenge is finding replacements for parts that are become unavailable. But the parts you need to build almost anything are out there if you're willing to do a little searching. Although all our products use vacuum tubes in the audio path, we also use a lot of solid-state components in peripheral circuitry. For example, we build an audio compression amplifier that uses a pulse-width modulator as the level control element (with a FET switch). It always makes me smile to see a printed circuit board with SMT parts on it just an inch from a point-to-point tube socket. We hand-solder all those SMT parts. Take a look at the products we make and you will see how I was influenced by the equipment I loved from the 1950s. www.dwfearn.com 73, Doug K3KW The demand for leaded parts may be lower, but don't count them out. We can still purchase all of the parts for our "full" kits without any trouble. That's hundreds of different leaded parts from dozens of vendors. (Our full kits include the K1, K2, KX1, transverters, and nearly all of our mini-modules and accessories.) Take through-hole ICs, for example: Digikey shows about 400 different 8-pin DIP dual op-amps in stock from 17 different manufacturers. They stock over 700 types of DIP-package Microchip PIC parts. The SA612AN 8- pin DIP oscillator/mixer found in many ham designs is carried by at least half a dozen vendors, with thousands in stock. "Interesting" I/O chips like the TI TPIC6595N 8-bit shift register/ peripheral driver are still widely available in DIP packages -- I counted 9 vendors for this part. Or how about a leaded, 10-K, 1/4-watt, 5% resistor? Digikey has well over 2 million in stock from three manufacturers. Finally, consider transistors. I found 21 stocking vendors for new 2N2222's, and there must be tens of millions of them available surplus. Digikey alone stocks 10 different kinds of TO-92 JFETs. Home brew with full-size parts lives on! 73, Wayne N6KR ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
